London’s Metropolitan Police fails to record over 94,500 reported crimes each year, representing 10.5 percent of all reported crimes, according to estimates by the policing and fire services watchdog.
Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) found that officers were failing to accurately record crimes including domestic abuse and violence when they occurred alongside other crimes as well as some public order offences and low-level crimes.
Last year, the Met recorded over 800,000 crimes and the HMICFRS believes these near-100,000 annual missed recordings occur because officers did not “recognise” when crimes were committed or did not “understand” the need to record multiple offences when reported during police investigations.
“We believe that instances of crimes not being recorded generally occur when staff and officers do not recognise that a crime has been committed, or do not fully understand the need to record multiple offences disclosed during investigations,” the inspectorate found.
When auditing 1,369 reports of crime from the period 1 July 2017 to 31 December 2017, the HMICFRS found that 271 were related to domestic abuse and of these the force has recorded 230 – the remaining 41 not recorded “were mostly offences involving violence, such as actual bodily harm and common assault”.
By their estimates, the force failed to record over 28,100 violent crimes. Almost one in ten sexual offence crimes, including rape, were not recorded and of the 118 audited rape reports, 20 were not accurately recorded by London police.
These findings come after a shock poll revealed that more than half of people in the UK have lost confidence in the police with 57 percent saying they think that the control of whole areas has been surrendered by officers to criminals.
In January, it was revealed that London police have dropped investigations into thousands of lower-level offences and ignore certain crimes such as vandalism and vehicle crime — but “hate crime” continues to be investigated in all instances.
This is despite London experiencing rising crime rates under Labour’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, with data showing that just one in ten London knife robberies was solved by police last year.
The HMICFRS also examined other police forces, notably finding that Lincolnshire Police failed to accurately record nearly one in five crimes, rating the force as “inadequate”.
Lincolnshire Police was criticised in October 2017 for wasting resources by producing a 12-minute video promoting Islam in the UK in order to fight “hate crime”.
The force’s Chief Constable admitted on the day the video was released that it was facing a “serious challenge” over funding as figures show a double-digit rise in violent crimes in the region.